WILLIAM WEGMAN: THE ARTIST AND HIS DOG

By Amy Hempel; Amy Hempel is the author of ''Reasons to Live,'' a collection of short stories.

Published: November 29, 1987

IN WILLIAM WEGMAN'S STUDIO in New York's Hudson Valley, the blond floors appear to be stenciled in an abstract floral pattern. In fact, after prolonged efforts to keep his dog out of the way of workmen during construction, Wegman took a different tack: he painted his dog's feet green and let her loose inside. It is an example of what Wegman means when he says of his work in painting, drawing, video and photography, ''I pay a lot of attention to what the format is actually doing rather than what I want it to do.''

The dog with green feet is Fay, an otherwise elegant young Weimaraner making her art-world debut in Wegman's new show - a series of large-format, or 20-by-24-inch, color Polaroid prints - which opens Thursday in Manhattan's Pace/ MacGill Gallery.

Talk about a hard act to follow. Fay's predecessor is Man Ray, Wegman's companion and model for almost 12 years, a dog (also a Weimaraner) so celebrated and beloved that after his death from cancer in 1982, The Village Voice ran a full-cover photo of Ray as ''Man of the Year.''

Wegman had been photographing Ray for a number of years before he was invited by the Polaroid Corporation in 1978 to use one of its large-format cameras in its Cambridge, Mass., headquarters. The resulting portraits of Ray brought him his largest following, and some of the photographs later appeared in the book ''Man's Best Friend.''

The artist, in fact, became so closely identified with those photographs that some critics, reviewing his first show after Ray's death, said they missed the dog. Wegman, however, found this ''irresponsible,'' and says he ''felt nailed to the dog cross.'' ''Dog photography,'' he adds, ''is a fraction of what I do, but a compassionate one.''

A MODEST, ENGAGING MAN with a great deal of offhand humor, this multimedia artist was one of the leading conceptual artists of the late 1960's and 70's. His work tells a good story; it tells a good joke. A drawing titled ''How to

Cheat at Dice'' shows a hand with three dots across the palm, beneath a blank die. An early photograph of a parrot is titled ''Crow'' (the parrot casts the shadow of a crow). On the commercial-photography side, there are the magazine covers - Steve Martin for a recent Esquire, an Abyssinian cat for this month's Connoisseur. But Wegman is primarily, as a Southern fan put it, ''one o' them finer artists.''

Now 43 years old, Wegman started out as a painter. Some of his small, often figurative, paintings have been likened to those of Raoul Dufy; the artist himself has applied the term ''sophomore surrealism'' to some. ''He paints like a talented kid,'' wrote Jo Ann Lewis of The Washington Post. ''He does not, however, think like one, and therein lies the salvation of his paintings.''

Holly Solomon, his longtime dealer, will show new paintings by him in her New York gallery next May. Of his early work in video, she recalls: ''Video before Wegman was Andy Warhol recording a man sleeping for 24 hours. It was art about art. . . . Billy felt a real responsibility to engage an audience, and not just art people.''

Viewing some of Wegman's videos of the 1970's, you don't have to understand conceptual art to appreciate his correcting Man Ray's spelling, or urging him to smoke: ''Don't just puff - inhale. C'mon, you promised. How do you know you don't like it if you don't try it?''

Wegman says he ''had a revelation in the 60's - don't work over your own head.'' He also steered clear of ''work that bossed people around instead of moving them.'' He continues: ''I thought - I'll start doing things I really think about, not what I'm supposed to think about. So, of course, I started thinking about the dumbest sorts of things, and doing them in video.'' Forget tags like ''postmodernist.'' ''It's exciting when your own parents like your work,'' he says.

AFTER RAY'S death, Wegman owned two other dogs before he met Fay. One of the dogs died of a viral disease; the other was stolen. On a recent drive from his Manhattan loft to the studio upstate, Wegman tells me the story of Fay: ''I gave a talk in Memphis about two years ago, and in the audience was a woman who bred Weimaraners. I went to see the litter, but told her I just wasn't ready. Then I got on the plane, and it was like a perfume ad - I couldn't get one dog's face out of my mind.'' He phoned the breeder the next day and told her to send him Cinnamon Girl.

Renamed Fay, the 6-month-old pup was afraid of everything, trembling on her walks in a nearby park. At first, says Wegman, ''she was like a wounded helicopter on a leash, spinning around crazily and diving under parked cars.'' Fay calmed down when she went to Maine, where Wegman has a summer place on Loon Lake. She starred as the Pitcher in Wegman's hilarious short film ''Dog Baseball,'' which was shown on ''Saturday Night Live'' earlier this year.

Upstate, on 30 acres of wooded land flush with wild turkeys, the place where ''Dog Baseball'' was filmed, Wegman and I take turns batting tennis balls for Fay to retrieve. Weimaraners are retrievers, and Wegman says that during a Polaroid session, Fay will sometimes bring him one of the props, the seeming message being ''You may need this.''

Fay, at point, is a creature in a trance. She puts a spin on the classic retriever stance - hind legs stretched taut, head held high and straight ahead - by looking back at Wegman, her head fixed at an odd tilt, a look of obsession in the eyes that never leave the ball in Wegman's hand. Wegman releases the ball and explains: ''The best thing about Fay isn't visible in a photo. It's her voice. You say, 'Fay, speak,' and she sounds like a distant thunderstorm.'' He tries to demonstrate, but Fay is shy, and it takes a couple of tries in front of company.

Wegman tells me about the time Fay ''ate'' a couch belonging to his sister. ''Even when she is bad, she's so innocent you feel heavy-handed for scolding her,'' he says. ''And if you do scold her, she wags her tail like crazy -'Oh, aren't I silly!' ''

For her master's art, Fay has been buried in a gravel pit and posed in a Wonder Woman costume beside a stream in Maine. ''Ray was more of an equal,'' says Wegman. ''He had a sense of gamesmanship: if you do this to me, I can do this to you. Fay does things because I want her to.''

He is baffled by the occasional accusation of cruelty in posing the dogs in outrageous costumes or situations. Ray sulked when he wasn't being used, Wegman remembers. Sanford Schwartz, writing in The New York Review of Books, put it best when he likened the photo sessions to ''a stretched-out version of the crazed and blissful moment in a dog's life when his master picks up his lead, the metal clasp clinks, and he realizes that he's going to be taken for a walk.''

As for his new model, Wegman feels the most striking aspect of Fay in photos is her yellow ''Rousseau-like eyes.'' ''I knew she would stay and look gray,'' he says, ''but I didn't know about those orbs.''

Of a diptych of Fay and Wegman's assistant Andrea L. Beeman, the former wearing false eyelashes, the gallery owner Peter MacGill says, ''I look at this picture and I see two beautiful women.'' It is a perfectly reasonable response, given that Wegman seated the two so that their luminous eyes were on the same level, strengthening their connection. In another portrait in the show, there are two handsome Labrador retrievers (one belonging to MacGill). And who else, asks MacGill, would photograph black dogs against a black drop? Not only that, but the dogs are also loosely tied together at the neck with black tape. The punchline comes in the title: ''The Starn Twins,'' a nod to the young twin brothers who are currently receiving a lot of attention for their startling photographs.

As funny as some of these photographs are, they also possess great beauty and intrigue; all of them bespeak Wegman's technical expertise. In ''Sleeves,'' wherein Fay sits atop an ironing board, there is a kind of parallelism or symmetry in the gray fur and gray board cover, in Fay's legs and the legs of the ironing board. Other works are less formally pleasing, but there is an eerie way in which Fay's ashy coat is illumined, or an ear is lighted to a velvety sheen, that is heartbreaking.

In 1978, the building in which Wegman used to live burned; many of his negatives from the pre-Polaroid years were destroyed. Still, Wegman held on to some of the fire-damaged negatives of Man Ray. Recently, he spent several days cleaning the damaged negatives, noting the way the images of Ray ''bubbled weirdly.'' On the last night, Wegman dreamed that Ray was alive. In the dream, delighted, Wegman was computing the dog's age when Ray began to come apart, dissolving into blood, dying all over again. Wegman awoke to Fay, and a sound like distant thunder.